Simulating alteration on fingerprint images

Fingerprint alteration represents one of the newest challenges in biometric identification. The aim of fingerprint mutilation is to destroy the structure of the papillary ridges so that the identity of the offender cannot be recognized by the biometric system. The problem has received little attention and there is a lack of a real world altered fingerprints database that would allow researchers to develop new algorithms and techniques for altered fingerprints detection. The major contribution of this paper is that it provides a new public database of synthetically altered fingerprints. Starting from the cases described in the literature, three methods for generating simulated altered fingerprints are proposed.